An international coalition has formed around digital public infrastructure – services that empower citizens and drive local innovation. Could a Euro Stack help the EU break with the market logic of big tech and increase its geopolitical autonomy from the US?
Industrial policy is very much en vogue this autumn in Brussels, and the discussions have intensified since Donald Trump secured his return to the White House. Economic security and competitiveness are at the core of Ursula von der Leyen’s new European Commission, and digital technologies are seen as the drivers of both. The expectation of a less EU-friendly US administration has highlighted the current European dependence on the US cloud infrastructure and digital services as a geostrategic vulnerability.
After years of regulating the digital economy to protect Europeans from online harms ranging from surveillance and algorithmic discrimination to hate speech and misinformation, European leaders see closing the digital innovation gap with the US and China as the most urgent task. “The key driver of the rising productivity gap between the EU and the US has been digital technology,” former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi stated in his report on European competitiveness. The report urges to steer the ship in a new direction, and claims that, “while some digital sectors are likely already ‘lost’, Europe still has an opportunity to capitalise on future waves of digital innovation.”
While a lot of the debate revolves around AI, digital public infrastructure (DPI) is emerging as a topic that could serve the twin goals of geostrategic sovereignty and technological competitiveness, while preserving the EU’s values “by design”. “Towards European Digital Independence: Building the Euro Stack” was the topic of a well-attended event hosted by a multi-party coalition of members of the European Parliament this September, which promoted DPI as a tool “to power growth of a European innovation ecosystem, reduce reliance on foreign giant corporations, address public needs, protect rights, and support democracy.” The hope is that a “Euro Stack” based on such solutions could not only fortify the EU’s autonomy, but also lead to an attractive EU offer for emerging economies.
India put DPI on global agenda
DPI provides digitally enabled public service delivery that empowers citizens and communities and drives economic development and local innovation. It enables secure and interoperable access to services such as health care, financial services, and education. India put DPI on the international agenda as a vehicle for reaching the Sustainable Development Goals during its G20 presidency in 2023. In 2024, it gained further recognition as a sub-section of the UN Global Digital Compact.
India’s global recognition stems from its India Stack, which has provided access to financial and social services to more than a billion people. India Stack consists of three main building blocks: identity verification, payment systems and data exchange. There is however no universally agreed definition of DPI. The role of the private sector in building and operating those systems is only one decision governments face when they adopt DPI. Other questions are whether they should require public digital services to be built on open rather than proprietary technology. For democracies, another consideration is how to ensure public oversight.
Digital Commons as vehicles for democratic participation
“States have lost their monopoly on public infrastructures,” said Henri Verdier, France’s Ambassador for Digital Affairs, at a conference at the European Parliament in November 2023. Bringing the state back is the first step in pushing back on the commercialization of our public life, but this only serves democracy if there are safeguards against state-led centralization. India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system – which provides a unique identification number to citizens and residents – has been criticized for its centralization, and human rights organizations claim that it has led to the exclusion of marginalized groups.
The Open Future Foundation, therefore, deliberately uses the term Public Digital Infrastructure (with the word public in front), which it defines as “an infrastructure in the public interest but also with public participation.” This participatory aspect is reflected in the concept of Digital Commons, where collectively created and managed resources are open to the public, such as in Linux, Wikipedia or Open Street Maps. In the list of digital services, which the EU has identified as “very large online platforms” under the DSA, Wikipedia – with its global network of more than 280,000 volunteers who write and edit content for in hundreds of languages – is the only non-commercial offer.
What these models have in common is that they rely on open-source solutions such as open software, open data or open AI models. They reduce technological lock-ins through proprietary software (by US or Chinese big tech companies) by allowing a global community to maintain and adapt them and to innovate based on them. Germany is promoting such solutions through the Sovereign Tech Agency, which supports the maintenance of open-source software.
From service delivery to infrastructure independence
The UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation defines open-source products that advance the sustainable development goals as Digital Public Goods. Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multistakeholder initiative endorsed by the UN. Germany and Estonia are part of the international GovStack initiative, which advises governments and private organisations on scaling the digitalization of public services.
The EU and its member states need to ensure that this global engagement is matched by European solutions with high standards for digital rights, security and sustainability. Some solutions already exist or are in the making: The EU Digital Identity Wallet, which is in the late pilot phase, has to be introduced by all member states by 2026. Germany and France collaborate on open-source alternatives to Microsoft and Google for public servants, and countries such as Estonia or the Netherlands receive praise for their e-government or payment systems. The challenge for the EU is to bundle these offers (and their funding) in a coherent package.
Going beyond India’s narrower concept of DPI for digital service delivery, the Euro Stack’s proponents envisage it as providing domestic alternatives not only to US tech software and online platforms, but also to the so-called US “hyperscalers”, whose computing and data storage services the EU (just like India) relies on. After the failure of the Gaia-X project, the EU is looking for new ways to create a decentralized cloud infrastructure.
This would be where technology for the common good meets the EU’s geostrategic interest. “Ultimately, the EuroStack is not just a technological project – it is a political one,” writes Francesca Bria, a senior digital innovation advisor to the European Commission, in a recent AI Now publication on Europe’s digital industrial policy. It is an ambitious proposition, which means that the EU will need to amp up the innovation and coordination needed to realize its political project of a home-made sustainable, inclusive and democratic digital economy.
This article first appeared here: us.boell.org.
Read Sabine Muscat's policy brief "A Digital World Worth Living For: A Green compass for a human-centric international digital policy"
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.
